Contents:
Eine wahre Geschichte ; Vinzenz und Nino. Die Geschichte einer Einkehr ; Sonnenblumen. Allerlei wahre Begebenheiten ; Tapfer und treu. Eine Geschichte aus den Bergen ; Heimliche Sehnsucht. Wachtmeister Studer detective novel criticizing corruption in Bern, , filmed by Leopold Lindtberg ; Matto regiert novel about a psychiatric clinic, ; More detective novels, published after Glauser's early death: Der Tee der drei alten Damen novel, ; Gourrama novel, ; Tagebuch aus dem Irrenhaus [diary from the psychiatric clinic], written , published in: Klasse novel, ; Die Toten von Pabjanice stories, ; youth novels: Erlebnisse eines kleinen Ausreissers ; Giuseppe und Maria 4 volumes, Die Odysse einer Jugend 9 volumes, Die Geschichte einer Freundschaft ; vol.
Erwin kommt nach Schweden ; vol. Das Schiff ohne Hafen ; vol. Die Kinder auf der Insel ; vol.
Mirjam in Amerika ; vol. Aus Erwins Tagebuch ; vol. Der neue Bund ; Was am See geschah. Ein Roman von jungen Menschen youth novel, ; Bunte Perlen. Max Frisch architect writer.
Mit einem Nachspiel drama, ; Andorra. Briefwechsel mit der Mutter letters with his mother in , published in He was convinced that a story is finished only when it has changed for the worst possible which is not foreseeable but comes at random. Jugendmythen ; Grundwasserstrom. Reden zur Literatur speeches on literature, Wo wir wohnen short stories, ;. Episoden aus Rabenland poems, ; Eine Stunde vor Schlaf story, ; Abendanzug zu verkaufen story, ; Strafarbeit [extra-work] novel, reflecting his work in a corrective institution , ; Der schwarze Kasten. Second, the angel of God has, as a mark of his favor, entrusted the care of his children to Epithemeus.
But Behemoth successfully outwits the feeble Epimetheus, and two of the children are lost. At this point Doxa, the companion of the angel of God, appeals to Prometheus, who intervenes. The last child of God is rescued; the enemy hosts vanish; and Epimetheus is deposed. But Prometheus, spent after his efforts and old after his years in exile, declines the offered crown, and the future of the kingdom remains uncertain.
As Spitteler pointed out, the two brothers are not based on classical models but instead represent two contrary principles: Prometheus seeks to order his life in accord with the highest of ideals, and Epimetheus acquiesces in the ways of the world; the first battles relentlessly with contrary forces, and the second settles for the line of least resistance. More than forty years later, with his reputation established and near the end of his life, Spitteler published a refashioning of the same material as Prometheus der Dulder , Prometheus the Endurer.
In the spring of , under economic pressure, Spitteler took up a post that he held for four years at a high school in La Neuveville, northwest of Bern in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, where he moved with his mother. He was required to give lessons conducted in French in Greek, Latin, and German. Since this post was a full-time job, there was restricted time for him to pursue his own writing. Extramundana , Extra-terrestrial Matter was published through the good offices of Widmann by the Leipzig firm Haessel, who also published Meyer; the author did not receive a fee but was not required to pay for publication.
The volume includes a collection of seven myths in verse, mostly pertaining to the creation of the world, and, in the first edition, carrying a set of explanations in prose. Once again, there was virtually no public reaction, but this time Spitteler himself expressed reservations about the quality of the poems. However, Extramundana marks nonetheless a stage in his long literary apprenticeship: The couple had two daughters: Work on two texts continued.
The completed manuscript was circulated among well-disposed friends and critics but received largely negative responses, and a revised second act sent to the Basel Municipal Theater in was rejected. Spitteler had better fortune with another project. He returned to his drafts from the s on Prester John and reworked this material into Eugenia, a literary rendition of his relationship with Sophie Brodbeck, who appears as the duchess Eugenia, the benevolent and sympathetic promoter of her nephew John.
The first cantos of this epic were serialized in DerBundin early In the autumn of the same year, Spitteler was able, again through the efforts of Widmann, to obtain a job as Feuilletonsredaktor reporter in the cultural features section with the newspaper Grenipost Border Post in Basel. The move with his family to Basel was the start of a seven-year period of literary journalism, during which Spitteler substantially widened his acquaintanceships in literary circles and published many essays.
In the nearly two years with the Grenipost, he reviewed books, wrote articles on the arts, and commented, initially at least, on politics in Switzerland and elsewhere in Europe, the latter activity demonstrating that the famous speech of , Unser Schweiier Standpunkt, was not a completely isolated incident. Almost three years of insecurity followed, during which short periods of employment as a literary journalist filling in for absent staff members supplemented the fees he earned from his freelance stories some of which drew on his Russian experiences , essays on literature and aesthetics, and book reviews.
The importance of this contact was also that it afforded Spitteler a voice beyond the boundaries of Switzerland—he was slowly establishing a reputation in the literary world, and journeys to Germany and Austria brought him into contact with editors of other leading reviews, though not always with an outcome in his favor. Every poem centers on a butterfly or is seen from the perspective of a butterfly, which is presented as being symbolic both of the fate of humanity in an evilly disposed world and of the beauty and ephemerality of human love. Schmetterlinge marks a change from the visions of Prometheus und Epimetheus to a closer observation of the real world.
This job represented a major advance for him, not only in terms of his personal reputation but also in financial terms, for it was a well-paid post. Spitteler moved to Zurich and worked there from the beginning of to the middle of His contacts in the world of literature increased and became firmer.
He was able, by means of his reviews and essays in the leading newspaper of German-speaking Switzerland, to contribute to public standards of taste and judgment; and he was able to encourage talented writers by publishing their work in the columns for which he was responsible. The writer who had struggled to make his name was now, in his mid forties, a man with a position of influence whom people sought out.
Spitteler accepted the commission, and Der Ehrgeizige Greedy for Honor was performed in November ; since the scenery had already been built and the expectations of a conventional celebratory allegory were also already in place, Spitteler had little choice but to create a temple of the Muses presided over by Apollo, the incorporation of light and perfection, where the good things in the contemporary theater and opera world were passed in review for the benefit of the new theater.
It was a short story portraying the largely self-inflicted misadventures of a young farm boy in a conscious attempt by Spitteler to counter the contemporary sentimentalization of country life. The cycle of poems Literarische Glekhnisse Literary Parables presents in parable form the forces against which the author had struggled for so long and which, by the end of the s, must have seemed to be vanquishing him: Yet, the tone is not harshly polemical, nor is the perspective overly particular, so that the poems generate a sense of wide concerns and universal applicability—factors picked up by the critical response, which was unanimously positive and welcoming.
For Spitteler the move represented a radical change. But, in a testimony to the depth and strength of his sense of mission, his major concern continued to be the composition of his literary works. In the early Lucerne years many old ideas were refashioned and new ones drafted. First, Balladen , Ballads again evinces his independent attitude toward genre and fashion. The poems are by no means all ballads in any accepted sense of the term; the majority are revisions of dramatic and epic fragments, and many draw on mythology and legend.
Neither in form nor in content do they relate to contemporary German poetry. Second, in the Gotthard Railway Company approached Spitteler with the request that he write a publicity book on the company, and he accepted in the mistaken belief that the task could be carried out without serious interference with his own work. Not until the spring of was he able to deliver the manuscript, which was published as Der Gotthard in the autumn of the same year.
Third, Lachende Wahrheiten ; translated as Laughing Truths, is the first work to be published by Diederichs of Leipzig who, on the recommendation of Avenarius, had approached Spitteler for a collection of his essays and had thus begun a long and not always easy collaboration. Fourth, Conrad der Leutnant , Conrad the Lieutenant , which had already in been serialized in a German magazine under the title of Der schwarze Sonntag von Herrlisdorf The Black Sunday of Herrlisdorf , is one of the pieces that Spitteler regarded as exercises in writing in the realist manner.
He wanted to show that it was by choice and not from inability that he did not depict the real world in the epics that he regarded as his major contribution to literature. The presentation in the novella of the clash between a father and a son over the management of a village inn, of the social conflicts within a restricted framework, and of the interpersonal relationships on differing levels of society verges at times on caricature.
The tragic death of the son does not seem properly motivated and fails to impart to the reader a sense that it is a necessary outcome of the action. Thus, the formation of his ideas and their committal to paper, some of which were present in Balladen, had gained steadily in momentum, reaching fruition in the first years of the new century. The rhythmical prose of the earlier epic has been replaced by iambic hexameters with alternating masculine and feminine rhymes, and the five parts of the final version total some twenty thousand lines.
In part 1, Die Auffahrt: Overture , Ananke, who represents unalterable necessity and who, as a symbol of the predetermined, even mechanistic forces of fate, is himself controlled by even more incomprehensible forces, is dispatching, in fulfillment of the cycle of change that each eon demands, a new generation of gods to control the earth. Under the guidance of Hades and Uranos, the gods make their way to Olympus, the sun-drenched peak in whose shadow the humans live. In the course of the two-day journey, the gods simultaneously witness and represent the forces governing the world: Their progress is characterized by a sense of awakening, of a new beginning against which is set the twilight of the god Kronos as a pointer to the ephemerality of the coming Olympian splendor.
From the palace of light of the daughters of Uranos, the new gods arrive by airship at the heights of Olympus. In part 2, Hera die Braut Hera the Bride , the god who succeeds in winning the queen will become king of the gods.
Here, too, there is a cyclical pattern: Hera is the current queen. Competitions in singing, reciting, running, chariot racing, and interpretation of dreams and prophecy are organized, and in the course of these events the individual qualities of the gods begin to emerge. He is the god of the spirit and most noble of all heroes, who harmonizes physical and spiritual perfection; but his victory is irrelevant, for Ananke has determined in advance that Zeus, the taciturn, ruthless man of action, possessed by a will to power that deprives him of all happiness, shall be king of Olympus.
He wins Hera, the dominating, intriguing woman who ensnares men, and he inherits her matriarchal empire. At the suggestion of Zeus, Apollo agrees to rule in the realm of beauty while Zeus rules in the realm of reality. In part 3, Die hohe Zeit The Noble Time , the goddess of fate, Moira, suspends time to allow a celebration of the union of Zeus and Hera to take place; an Olympian spring ensues, during which the gods and their companions descend to Earth to experience adventures that have a symbolic content. Pallas rebels against death as a destroyer but is eventually reconciled to it as beneficial and just; Apollo, who drives the chariot of the sun, has to contend with the foolishness of those who seek to impose a new sun on him; Dionysius, the visionary youth, is a symbol of religious experience; Poseidon, representing the foolish man of strength, vainly expends his energies in seeking to cause water to flow uphill.
The sequence of episodes depicts play and struggle, enjoyment and disappointment, and pleasure and sorrow. In part 4, Ende und Wend The End of the Noble Time , Aphrodite, with her grace and beauty, enslaves men and drives them to every form of folly on her behalf, and her overweening pride at her powers causes her to stage for the benefit of the other gods a display of the manner in which she can create disruption in human affairs.
In part 5, Zeus, Ananke confirms his rule on Earth when, as the mass of humans seek to free themselves, he reasserts his dominion over them by confirming their lack of dignity and spiritual independence. The gods are summoned back to Olympus by Zeus, who has decided to go in disguise to the land of humans, where he discovers that they revere an ape dressed as a king.
Enraged at this blindness and stupidity and at their treatment of him, Zeus resolves to exterminate the human race; but Grogo, the daughter of Ananke, forces him to relent, and he decides instead to help the human race. He prepares his son Heracles for the task of redeeming humanity, and the epic poem closes with the young man who obeys his own soul—a cardinal distinction between Heracles and the generality of humans—leaving to begin his mission. His departure is linked to the opening of the epic and so to the hopefulness of a new beginning, but it is also attended by the knowledge that the redemption of humans as they have been depicted in the course of the poem will pose a challenge verging on the insurmountable: The hope is that Heracles will inspire by his example.
The world is deeply flawed and in thrall to death and violence. Human behavior is governed by pride, greed, foolishness, and shortsightedness, and the control exercised by these failings over the majority of people makes a mockery of the concept of free will. Amazon Music Stream millions of songs. Amazon Advertising Find, attract, and engage customers. Amazon Drive Cloud storage from Amazon.
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His departure is linked to the opening of the epic and so to the hopefulness of a new beginning, but it is also attended by the knowledge that the redemption of humans as they have been depicted in the course of the poem will pose a challenge verging on the insurmountable: Second, Spitteler held himself aloof from political activity although his essays show his awareness of contemporary situations ; yet, the highly political speech he made at a turbulent moment just after the outbreak of World War I in , Unser Schweizer Standpunkt , Our Swiss Point of View , remains a key definition of Swiss neutrality in the modern world. When it became public in that Diggelmann had given in to ideological pressure in order to have his book published in communist Eastern Germany his reputation was definitely ruined - though he was, of course, basically right with his analysis that anti-communism and sympathy for nazism are closely related - not only in Switzerland. On the other hand, the impossibility of a real relationship with Theuda constitutes a necessary psychological element in the artistic process. Notkers translations of religious writings and hymns were important for the development of the German language.